Random musings about Free/Libre/Open Source Software - and also about Linux and the way that the world is, gadgets and trends

Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Hell freezes over

The entirety of Canonical is now open source - that includes all the infrastructure (Launchpad, Soyuz) which was formerly closed source.

This has been intended for some time and Canonical faced significant criticism from some sectors of the FLOSS community that they relied on closed source programs. Good to see someone follow through.

Microsoft have released Windows driver code under the GPL

This may allow Linux to run on top of Windows server editions running Hyper-V virtualisation.Not much - SCSI, IDE and Ethernet drivers, apparently - but they are released under the GPL. Microsoft have already entered into virtualisation cross licensing with Red Hat some months ago, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an obvious target platform here. It's under GPL - so every distribution can do this in short order and Microsoft is now using the OS and licence once described as cancerous by Steve Ballmer and actively contrbuting.